The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

Jessica: I work for the company that hires the chat agents for sprint. I just wanted to let you know that after you guys posted “Sprint To Customer: “Are You Nucking Futs?”“, the supervisors found the person and they have been fired. Thanks for the heads up! there’s no way it would have ever been found.benpopken: Ha, sweet, which company is that?Jessica: It’s called InQ. “Jessica” (we’re all “Jessica”) is a real person, every time. no auto-responses, just scripts. But that person just was really new and apparently didn’t “get it”. I’ve been working there for about 6 months, and that’s the first time I’ve seen something like that.benpopken: How did the company track down which “Jessica” it was?

Jessica: By hand, going through chats that took place on the last 2 fridays around 517pm (like the screen cap showed.)benpopken: How was the matter addressed internally? Was there an announcement?Jessica: It wasn’t necessary, once a single person knew it spread like crazy to all the departments. But the general concensus around the office was “oh my god, what were they thinking??” There’s a zero tolerance policy for anything like that. So basically the person was just walked out the next day. no one would have known who it was, but he gave some people a carpool ride, so process of elimination…Jessica: I don’t know if sprint corporate has even commented on it to inq yet, if so, they didn’t tell us. but apparently he was fired before sprint said anything or saw it on your site.benpopken: Is that common, razzing customers?Jessica: Not at all. We deal with some of the angriest and craziest sprint customers, too, and we have like zero access to anything. So we’re sitting there trying to help them, but we cant see their account or change anything, etc. All we really have is sprint.com to help us, which isn’t much.benpopken: That must make it difficult at timesJessica: It is, but there’s no excuse for what that kid pulled. None of us ever do anything like that, and we try our best to assist people when we can. I’m a sprint customer, too, so i know it can be like the worst thing in the world sometimes, but that guy was waaay out of line saying that, and on a whole, I think that doesn’t reflect our service. Thanks for the tip, again, the timely notice of that might have saved all our jobs. Again, my name is Jessica. Thank you for visiting Sprint.com today!